After the last actor is displaced by a computer, and the history of
Hollywood is written, American film will be divided into two epochs:
B.C.–before Clift –and then the era that he ushered in: an era that
was shaped by the intellectual energy and creative introspection
that the actor brought from the New York stage when he made his
first film, Red River, in 1948.

Before Motgomery Clift, film acting was
stylized and disciplined. As Robert Wagner puts it in his
autobiography, Pieces of My Heart, professionals like Spencer Tracy
approached their craft–acting–with a direct focus: “block it,
rehearse it, do it, move on.”

Clift, and then
Marlon Brando who became even better known–and imitated–changed
everything. Before tackling a part, they analyzed the role,
sometimes with their acting coach in tow. To the old guard, Clift
and Brando were “dirty shirt-tailed” actors , but soon they, and
other members of the Actors Studio who used Stanislavski’s so-called
Method to think themselves into a role, had taken over Hollywood.

The New York invasion
which included James Dean and Paul Newman quickly pushed aside a
generation of young Hollywood actors who had been groomed to replace
aging matinee idols like Tracy and Clark Gable.

Among the young actors who overnight seemed dated were Robert Wagner
and Jeffrey Hunter, both of whom were good looking and clean-cut
enough to have stepped off a Midwest campus. Hunter, in fact, had
graduated from Northwestern where he was president of his
fraternity.

Virginia Leith

Robert Wagner had grown up in the shadow
of the film colony and had caddied at the Bel-Air Country Club where his
parents were members. One of those he followed around the links was
Clark Gable, and early on, he caught the acting bug.

Both Gable and
another family friend, director William Wellman, tried to help RJ, as he
was known, break into the business, but it was the young man’s winning
smile that caught the attention of Twentieth Century-Fox’s drama coach,
Helen Sorrell. It was indeed a lucky break since Darryl Zanuck, the head
of the studio, who was better known for discovering starlets, had seen
the same screen test and was ready to turn thumbs down.

As a contract
player at Fox, Wagner started at seventy-five dollars a week. “I wasn’t
very good, but I was diligent,” he wrote with un-Hollywood like modesty
in his autobiography. Around the studio, he proved himself cooperative
and willing to learn, even paying for extra voice coaching out of his
own pocket.

This diligence paid off.
In the early 1950s, Wagner was cast in a succession of increasingly
bigger parts. He played a young marine in Halls of Montezuma, directed
by Lewis Milestone, and a Purdue student trapped on the Titanic, in a
1953 movie of the same name that starred Clifton Webb and Barbara
Stanwyck. Although Miss Stanwyck was some fifteen years older than
Wagner, she and the young contract player entered into a happy backlot
romance that itself seemed right out of a movie.

In 1954, Wagner was named by Photoplay magazine as
“the rising star” of the year, and the movie Prince Valiant, in which he
had the title role, was a hit. But something was wrong. Instead of being
idolized for playing a shining hero in an age of chivalry, Wagner found
himself ridiculed and impersonated by grips around the studio.

Suddenly, Wagner realized that he was “swimming
against the tide” and had modeled himself “after an earlier era” that
was being swept away by the revolution ushered in by Clift and Brando.

Hoping to change his image, Wagner selected as his
next project, A Kiss Before Dying, which, he later wrote, “erased a lot
of the jokes about Prince Valiant.” Based on the Ira Levin novel, the
film deals with a twisted young army veteran named Bud Corliss who is
determined to avoid the trap of tract homes with no down payment that
sprang up in post-World War II America.

As
the young man vows to his mother in the movie, “I won’t wind up like Dad
with holes in my shoes.” “Oh, you won’t,” she assures him. “You’re a
genius.”

And, in a way, he was: a criminal genius. Enrolling in college on the GI Bill, Bud meets Dorrie Kingship, the daughter of a copper baron, who falls hard for her ambitious suitor. When Dorrie becomes pregnant, however, Bud knows that her highly moral father will disinherit her even if they marry. So he disguises her murder to appear a suicide. Later, Bud pops up in the Southwest to woo the dead girl's beautiful sister. The rest of the movie involves his efforts to coldly dispatch those who try to unravel his crime.

Robert L. Jacks arranged to produce the movie
through United Artists, a film company that other studios used for their
controversial projects (or to disguise a studio head’s financial
interest). In one of her early roles, Joanne Woodward played the hapless
heiress. Wagner’s close friend, Jeffrey Hunter, was the student campus
cop who pursues the killer. Mary Astor, a former leading lady, played
Bud’s worshipful mother, and George Macready (1899-1973), an excellent
character actor, was Leo Kingship, Dorrie’s wealthy father. Virginia
Leith, whose film career later faltered, appeared as Dorrie’s sister.

The Young Genius

Gerd Oswald directed. The cinematographer, Lucien
Ballard (1908-1988), had worked as a film editor and then served a long
apprenticeship as a cameraman at various studios. In 1945, he married
actress Merle Oberon whom he met while shooting The Lodger. Known for
his black and white photography, Ballard adeptly filmed the dazzling
desert backdrop in A Kiss Before Dying which was released in 1956.

Wagner’s performance in the movie was cool and
understated; as the actor puts it, A Kiss Before Dying has become “a
cult film over the years.”

Although RJ’s friends “disdained” the Method, he
was in favor of any technique that helped free an actor up and get him
“where he needs to go.” So Wagner visited New York and sat in Actors
Studio sessions as an observer, a privilege that Lee Strasberg, the
Studio’s autocratic director, sometimes accorded Hollywood celebrities.
The experience was disappointing. Wagner caught the Studio members
looking at him and “rolling their eyes.” In turn, he realized some of
them were snobs who only “loved to talk about acting” and who dismissed
him as “the pretty kid who had made Prince Valiant and been laughed at.”

In 1957 Wagner married Natalie Wood who had
appeared with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Wagner knew that
Natalie had had an affair with Nicholas Ray, the film’s director, and
remained close to some cast members, like Nick Adams, but she became
integrated into her husband’s circle of older actors, and the Rebel crowd disappeared. Natalie and Wagner were later divorced, then
remarried, and remained together until her tragic death in a boating
accident in 1981.

By the 1960s, tired of the string of “losers” Fox
had put him into, and with the studio floundering under Spyros Skouras,
Wagner left for Europe. His career revived, and he appeared in a number
of acclaimed movies, including The Pink Panther (1963 ) and The
Condemned of Altona (1962 ). The latter was directed by Vittorio De Sica
and based upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s play about a German industrialist’s
misdeeds during World War II.

Following his return home, Wagner launched a highly successful
television career, as an actor and co-producer of Charlie’s Angels. Among his shows was Hart to Hart, a series in which he appeared with
Stephanie Powers.

The father of three daughters, Wagner today lives in Los Angeles with
his wife, actress Jill St. John, the lovely James Bond heroine. Here in
an exclusive interview with American Legends conducted over the
telephone, Robert Wagner recalls the making of A Kiss Before Dying.

On Location

AL:

How did you come to make A Kiss Before Dying?

RW:

My sister, Mary Lou, read a condensed version in
Redbook. She told me, “This would be a wonderful thing for you to play.” I
kind of got it off the ground. Then Bob Jacks, a Fox producer, who worked on
Prince Valiant, got a hold of it, and off we went. It was released through
United Artists, but most of people, like myself, and Jeff Hunter, were loan
outs from Fox.

AL:

Lucien Ballard who shot Prince Valiant was
the film’s cinematographer. He was highly regarded by Henry Hathaway and
other directors.

RW:

He was one of the best lighting cameramen in the
business. On A Kiss Before Dying, the lighting was difficult. In Arizona,
where part of the movie was shot, the light was extraordinary. Since the
cameraman has to balance the interiors with exteriors, it means he has to
put more light on the interiors. That can cause the actors to squint or the
set to become overheated. Lucien developed some interesting gels to put on
the windows, things like that. He was very inventive. Women just adored him.
When he worked with Merle Oberon, he invented a light that smoothed out some
facial scars she had from an automobile accident. It became known as the
Obie.

AL:

How did Ballard interact with Gerd Oswald, the
director, and the cast?

RW:

Lucien worked closely with Gerd. They very much
respected each other’s talents. Gerd was a man who welcomed any kind of
suggestions. Lucien was tremendous with people. He really appreciated
actors. He was always very patient.

AL:

Film reviewers often overlook the
contribution of a cinematographer.

RW:

Cameramen can be put in a very difficult
situation. They don’t always have the best light or adequate time. They
have to get the shot and move on. A great cameraman is someone who can
take a set that’s nothing and make it look good.

AL:

Gerd Oswald (1916-1989) made only a handful
of Hollywood films. One critic, Andrew Sarris, regretted that he was
treated with “indifference” by most reviewers. Why didn’t Oswald’s
career take off?

RW:

I don’t know why Gerd was overlooked.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who are overlooked. Gerd and I did
quite a few things together. He directed me in a television version of The
Oxbow Incident, and I thought his work stood up to the (1943) William
Wellman film.

AL:

In your book, you
paid tribute to his talent.

RW:

Gerd loved film. He came from a very distinguished
background. His father had been a noted director in Germany. Gerd did a lot
of research, and was always looking for ideas.

AL:

What was Oswald like on the set of A Kiss Before
Dying?

RW:

We rehearsed a lot, but when
it was set, it was pretty well set. There was not a lot of improvisation. Gerd
was very loyal to the story, but was always looking for ways to make it
better. He was a very creative man, into texture, backlighting.

AL:

Playing a psychopath was a radical departure
from the roles Fox was giving you. How did you get a characterization
for such a part?

RW:

A psycho does not believe he is
a psycho. I tried to do it as believable as possible and not tip it off.
Jeff Hunter, and Joanne Woodward who had come out of New York, were good to
work with. I think we just decided on balance what would be good. We were
all into character, revelation. It was a collaborative effort.

AL:

When the Method came to Hollywood with Clift and
Brando, acting styles changed.

RW:

They woke everybody up to a
different style of acting, a different style of shooting a film.

AL:

You later worked with Nick Ray in The Return of
Jesse James (1957). Ray complained that he was not able to establish a
rapport with you.

RW:

I played Jesse James. Jeff Hunter was Frank James.
There wasn’t a whole lot of discipline on the set. Everybody was looking
around to see what was happening. As I wrote in my book, Ray liked to have
all these acolytes around him. He was a very confused man. He’d stare off
into space, then tell you: “Try this. No. Wait. Try that.” Every morning
we’d wonder what he would be like that day. Incidentally, the book was
written with Scott Eyman whose knowledge of Hollywood is tremendous.

AL:

What was Fox’s attitude toward A Kiss Before
Dying?

RW:

During the filming, the studio left us alone. We
were not on the lot. The interiors were shot at the old Selznick studio. We were
all young and enthusiastic and excited to be doing something that was not a
programed movie. I think the studio thought it was interesting. It opened
their eyes a bit. This picture was way ahead of its time.

(Background information was
obtained from Robert J.Wagner’s Pieces of My Heart, written with Scott Eyman,
HarperCollins, 2008)